A Long Boring Explanation of My Reading Patterns

This is one of those posts that really, unless you're interested in the hows and whys of my reading 'cycles' you can certainly skip and I won't be insulted.  Thanks for stopping by all the same.

Before college I was obsessed with reading.  I remember reading Somerset Maugham for a grade school book report.  And Postern Of Fate.  I probably was the bane of my English teacher's existence.  My first romance was Jane Eyre, which I read with a box of tissues on my bed, sobbing.  I made my way alphabetically through the stacks in the school libraries, heck I STARTED the library club, a good way to avoid kickball during recess.

And therefore it made perfect sense to me to take English literature classes in college, and I ended up majoring in English.  Which was good, don't get me wrong.  I'll never be able to forget the Donne, Herbert, Marvell, Lovelace...I can't get rid of my Chaucer or my Arden Complete Shakespeare...I still have the New English Translation of the Bible I bought for $18 second hand - my first *real* Bible, complete with this strange thing called an Apocrypha...it's all fresh as the day it happened.

But I also got completely and totally burned out with reading.

After college I started working in a little indie bookstore in my hometown.  I believe I was there for about 4 years, and I did find some new authors, but for the most part I immersed myself in young adult and children's literature.  Sometimes I would try and get into something 'fluffy' (Diana Gabaldon, anyone?) but I just didn't have the stamina for it.  Books came out, great books, books I heard amazing things about, and I couldn't do it, I couldn't read them.

Eventually it got to the point where it wasn't so much that I didn't have the energy so much as I'd gotten lazy. Reading takes muscles, and I didn't have them - I was reading weak.

It was about 4 years after I started at that bookstore that I decided to go back to school, and that necessitated a move, and THAT meant a new job, this one also at a little indie bookstore.  This bookstore specialized in children's books, and I read tonnes of them.  And you know, there are some great authors out there who write fantastic books - but I knew that they weren't challenging me.

Enter the child-bearing years.  Four long years of vomiting, nursing and dragging recalcitrant offspring to the library in order to try and find/borrow a book for them, and then a few weeks later to return it late and pay the fees.

So here I am, now, smack dab in the difficult toddler years with two babies and a third on the way.  And if you think I have time for reading then you just come on over here and do my laundry for me.  But for the first time in a long while I was unhappy with every old five-times-re-read book on my shelves and I needed something else to read.  Which meant that yesterday I went to the library and did something I haven't done in almost a decade...I wandered up and down the adult fiction section looking for a 'good book'.  I found four, and I'm doing my best to read them, to get 'back into the game'.  I'm so far out of the game I'm in another park; I couldn't tell you who's won ANY prize in the past five years with the exception of Alice Munro.  Who's short stories I didn't like.

I'll let you know how it goes.

I can't eat. My child is not sleeping. World's boringest shopping.

I think that ultimately I'm an easy person to please; I don't need nor do I expect grand gestures of almost any type at all, in fact most things that would fall into a category where 'gesture' is an appropriate label would be pretty much guaranteed to make me such in my breath through my teeth in silent disapproval and discomfort.  Imagine how fun I am at parties.  No, really, go ahead.

But actually, once I started thinking about it I'm really not all that easy to please.  And I'm thinking here about a topic that is pretty much guaranteed to garner some sucking-in-of-breath all it's own (although not my breath, clearly).  I detest my laundry so much it's almost a physical CLOUD of unhappiness descending over me.  And probably the biggest part of that contempt revolves around how STAINED everything seems to be ALL THE TIME.  It's as though my family, as soon as they're out of my line of sight, roll in tomato sauce and scrambled eggs and baby poo and then deposit the clothes around the house for me to find.  No one is immune to this.  Although to be 100% fair I will admit that I am the biggest producer of what appears to be grease stains on the fronts of shirts.  I don't know why this is since as far as I know I don't have any sort of difficulty eating.  I do have quite long hair so perhaps my HAIR is dipping into my food and then touching my clothes?  Okay, that thought is making me queasy.

***

Samuel has just recently stopped napping regularly and it makes me pretty darn sad and depressed that my guaranteed afternoon quiet time is disappearing.  I want him to sleep for two hours in the middle of the afternoon forever.  And the truth is that I CAN still get a good nap out of him but only if I exhaust him in the morning and these days I'm just not up for that.  Plus when he naps he wakes up in a terrible mood that sometimes lasts for an hour or more and drags everyone down with him.  And he's also up way past when I personally think 3.5 year olds should be awake - think 9 pm or later.  Since I would also like to go to bed at 9 pm and have child free time before I do so - this is not okay.  Not. Okay.  All of that is to say that I think naps are going to have to be cut for Samuel and a firmer hand used around the bedtime arrangements.  I've added it to my 'things to do before the baby arrives' list.

***

Also on that list is buying car seats.  Again.  Good Lord, have mercy on me a sinner.  Car seats are pretty much right up there with snow tires and white cotton underpants and pasta on my list of Most Boringest Things To Buy Ever.  "Oh, now THIS car seat goes to THIS weight limit and reclines at THIS angle and comes in Blue Sunrise Burst pattern, but then THIS car seat reclines at the better angle but only comes in Orange Surprise pattern.  Wait, Orange Surprise is out of stock you say?  Well, drat, okay then THIS...."  AGGGGHHHH.  If I had my way I would walk into a store, choose three identical seats that were upholstered in whatever hid vomit the best, and put them in my car and drive away.  The only factors I am interested in are price and utility.  However, the world being fallen as it is, I'm not so lucky.  We have a Pontiac Grand Am and soon to be three children to stuff into the back seat of it, so I need 'special' (read: expensive) seats.  Seats that are significantly more narrow that a standard car seat.  With not-narrow price tags.  Ugh.

***

I'm pregnant. I'm terrible at keeping my temper. Nothing is dead under my porch.

So, in case you follow me entirely via this particular medium and not, say, on Facebook or...well, however else people communicate these days, I shall share our Big Exciting News.  I'm pregnant.  Samuel is 3 years, 7 months, Clara is 18 months and as far as one can know these sorts of things, I'm early in my first trimester. Feel free to comment along the lines of "Oh my, won't you have your hands full!" "Wow!  You're certainly having them close together!" Etc. etc. I will warn you, however, in the interests of giving you a head start, that this time around I am Very Moody.  I'm also Quite Opinionated, and I articulate myself well in print.  Just a friendly reminder.

***

In other news, we had a visiting youth group here from a church about 5 hours away.  Among the other things they accomplished was putting up new lattice under my back porch.  The back porch hadn't been entirely cleaned out underneath though, and so there's a big black garbage bag I see sticking juuust out from the lattice and it's annoying me.  I can ignore the dropped clothespins and what have you but that bag is beyond my abilities.  What's worse is that it seems to have something in it.  So I can't PULL it out of the latticework.  And besides, my imagination tells me, what if it's a HEAD or something?  Or a DEAD ANIMAL.  Good heavens.  And then we'd have the police here and...I do realize how awful it is that I clearly would have preferred that the teenage children visiting from another church discover the imaginary horrors underneath my porch.

***

Do you find that your children often receive gifts that they are very excited about and you are not?  It seems to happen to us a lot, and I'd be interested to know how others handle it.  Handle it in a reasonable and not antagonistic way, that is.  I'm not interested in comments that go along the lines of "I tell everyone exactly what I want them to give my children and refuse all other things" because that sort of advice would neither work with our situation nor my personality.  From what I've been able to figure out my difficulties mainly arise from two points.

First, and probably more prevalent, is that I have ideas about what children need and I don't tend to deviate from those ideas easily.  I'm attempting to think of a non-condemning type example of this.  Okay, can we agree on clothing as a possible no-one-will-think-I'm-talking-about-them example?  I think Clara has too many pairs of pants when I can't fit them into her designated pants drawer.  I realize this is arbitrary and I don't care, that's not the purpose of this example.  The point is that I have made a guideline because I believe that a guideline is necessary and right in this particular situation.  The convenient but at the same time unfortunate result of this sort of thinking is that I have just what I need, but that I do not want/need more of any particular thing.

Secondly, we live in what I think is an adequate sized house for our family, but which, if we were to poll people, would turn out to be on the small size across the general population.  The main issue with the house is the almost complete lack of storage, and the last thing I want is More Things.  Even More Things that are pretty and useful.

***

I haven't experienced my usual pregnancy cravings, but I have found myself thoroughly revolted by almost all foods at one point or another so far.  This has progressed way beyond what I remember from any of my previous pregnancies.  This evening, while attempting to choke down a gorgeous meal cooked to perfection by my husband, which I could barely touch let alone look at, I offered to make nothing but Thai food for the next several weeks/months because it seems very non-repellent to me.  I would be willing to extend to Vietnamese food as well, but not, as requested by David, to Indian.

***

A show was advertised on tv this evening that recalls the emotional lives of parrots and is called Parrot Confidential.  It's situations like this that leave me struggling not to mock.